Maritime security vital to India’s interests

KP Nayar

Strategic Analyst

The first “open debate” in the United Nations Security Council under India’s presidency last week once again brought out a home truth which powerful lobbies in New Delhi are constantly trying to suppress. When push comes to shove, India’s best friend in the 15-member Security Council is Russia.

Russia has been an unchanging friend in the Council for the last seven decades because its presence at the horse-shoe table of the UN’s most powerful organ is permanent. The Council’s ten members come and go. Of the other permanent members, France is a reliable friend too, but it is often hamstrung in its attitudes by the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union that it has to adhere to.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote to all the heads of state and government of the permanent members inviting them to personally take part in the open debate convened by India. Russian President Vladimir Putin was the only one who accepted. “Your initiative,” Putin told Modi, “is in line with the constructive role that India has traditionally played in the international arena, thus contributing to the promotion of multifaceted, mutually beneficial and equitable cooperation.”

When the fanfare and celebration over India’s current presidency of the Security Council after a nine-year gap is over, there will be a dispassionate, objective assessment of what New Delhi sought to gain with the first of its three thematic debates across the horse-shoe table this month. Eighty per cent of global trade today is via the sea and the Indian Ocean is among the most important shipping routes in the world.

Notwithstanding the primacy of sea lanes in the global movement of energy resources, the role of the oceans in other vital trade, the importance of living and inanimate marine resources and threats of maritime terrorism often highlighted by dramatic incidents at sea, there is no global consensus yet on what constitutes maritime security. If Security Council president TS Tirumurti’s initiation of last week’s debate moves the UN’s 193 member nations even a little bit beyond this starting point towards defining maritime security, the exercise would have achieved its objective.

The most substantive contributions at the open debate were made not by heads of state or government who hogged all the limelight because they have the bully pulpit and the wherewithal to widely disseminate their sermons from the pulpit under strobe lights.

If the India-sponsored debate had not taken place, would there have been a public acknowledgement that even though Covid-19 took a heavy toll on shipping activities last year, maritime security rose in its seriousness as a global threat? The answer is “No”. Armed robberies aboard ships and outright piracy rose by as much as 20 per cent when the pandemic swept the world in the first half of 2020. This vital bit of information came from Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, Chef de Cabinet to the UN Secretary-General, who presented a grim picture of maritime insecurity in her speech at the thematic debate.

More worrying, she said, incidents at sea in Asia have doubled. In the Gulf and the Arabian Sea, the lifeline for India’s energy supplies, insecurity levels are unprecedented. She then went to the heart of the matter. Everyone who took part in the debate spoke of the instrument which currently serves as the fountainhead of global maritime matters: the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS.)

“But this framework is only as strong as countries’ commitment to full and effective implementation,” Viotti pointed out to Security Council members. “We need to translate commitment into action.” Without that, no amount of summitry is going to work.

Another participant, who was not a head of state or government, was equally instructive. Ghada Waly, Executive Director at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), pointed to a fact which has become vital to human existence in the new millennium, but is often overlooked. She told the Security Council that “the network of submarine cables represents a critical vulnerability. Some smaller island states rely on a single cable connection.”

The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, set the stage for debating this important aspect of maritime security in a report entitled “Oceans and the Law of the Sea,” which said the oceans serve as transit areas for 99 per cent of the world’s Internet traffic. “During the Covid-19 crisis, usage increased by up to 50 per cent.”

Waly referred to an aspect of maritime insecurity which makes Indians highly vulnerable: the risks to seafarers. A vast majority of the oceangoing vessels have Indian staff on board. Many of them have died from pirate attacks and kidnapping for ransom from ship owners. “India has demonstrated its steadfast commitment to enhancing maritime security, including through the Indian Ocean Rim Association and the Bay of Bengal Initiative,” she said in acknowledgment of New Delhi’s continuing role

So where do we go from here, now that the cameras are off and the stage is bare, all the world leaders having exited after delivering their debate speeches. There is no doubt that like counter-terrorism, maritime security should be a top priority for India in guarding its place in the sun. It is too important a matter to be left to generalists in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) to be tasked to learn on the job.

India has globally acknowledged experts on maritime security. They need to be brought in and involved in the next steps to mitigate insecurity at sea. Rahul Roy-Chaudhury is a pioneer on this subject. When the Army was the focus in India and naval expansion was not being considered with any seriousness, Roy-Chaudhury provided the first holistic assessment of India’s maritime security needs in his seminal book 21 years ago by the same name: India’s Maritime Security.

Another influential voice on this subject in global diplomacy during India’s previous Security Council term a decade ago was Hardeep Singh Puri, who chaired the UN’s Sanctions Committee for Somalia and Eritrea at a time when piracy was emerging as a potentially big menace. Putting experienced Indians with such expertise like Puri and Roy-Chaudhury in charge of following up on last week’s debate instead of novice IFS officers is the best way forward.